Blog
Shaping Employees’ Soft Skills Through Tailored Onboarding
We've previously talked about the crisis in soft skills in corporate America—clear communication, empathic audience analysis, effective meeting skills, and the like. What we're hearing is that even new hires who have a natural instinct for soft skills, especially [...]
Presenting at Conferences to People You Don’t Know
If the audience for your business presentations is usually the same group of people—your internal team or a well-known client group—your assessment of them can become pretty instinctive and even subconscious. You share a common working language, and you know [...]
Hybrid Meetings: Being a Productive Participant
In our first post on hybrid meetings, we talked about best practices for managing focus when leading meetings with some people in the room and others participating remotely. But even if you’re not in the leadership role, you contribute to [...]
Hybrid Meetings: Projecting Professionalism
One of the many interesting observations from the pandemic is the evolution of people’s Zoom backgrounds. Initially, everyone was excited to play with the virtual backgrounds available online. I saw people log in from virtual versions of a dive bar, [...]
Showing and Telling: Effective Slide Delivery
Learners come into our workshops absolutely certain of one hard-and-fast rule: never ever read from your slides. They look pretty bewildered when we respond with, “Well, it’s complicated,” rather than emphatic agreement. The problem with “never read from your slides” [...]
Business Success Depends on Soft Skills
Over the last several decades, our economy has shifted from one with lots of rote work, whether blue-collar or white-collar, to one in which routine tasks are automated. This means that tasks still dependent on human input are more complex [...]
Earn Trust by Making Your Destination Clear
Do you have that friend or family member who offers you a ride and then doesn’t look at a map or set their GPS app because they’re so sure they know how to get to where they’re going? They may [...]
Being Inclusive When Your Audience Is Unknown To You, Part II
For too long, companies such as ours let it be other people's business to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive world. What authority did we, a small boutique training and consulting firm, have when it comes to another organization's [...]
Being Inclusive When Your Audience Is Unknown To You, Part I
For too long, companies such as ours let it be other people's business to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive world. What authority did we, a small boutique training and consulting firm, have when it comes to another organization's [...]
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